Think the TV show “Cops,” but the good guys are busting drug smugglers, illegal immigrants and terrorists. ABC network

has ordered 11 hours of “Border Security USA” from executive producer Arnold Shapiro (“Big Brother”). Shot on location throughout the United States, the series will focus on the efforts of border protection agencies to halt illegal smuggling and immigration.

A typical episode might jump from a border patrol in Texas to security screeners at a New York airport to a Coast Guard boat off Puerto Rico (from The Hollywood Reporter).

Best is producer Arnold Shapiro’s description of how Border Security USA will tell the “other side of the story.”

“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” he said. “This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”

We crossed through the San Ysidro – Tijuana port of entry yesterday for the first time. A river of cars, interchanges, pedestrian bridges. This is the border large scale.

The pedestrian plazas on the other side are relics of a time when Tijuana – though tumbledown and perhaps seedy - received enough American visitors to fill the Avenida Revolucion’s bars, cafes, and strip clubs.

No one goes there anymore.

As we made our way south on interstate 5 to the border, Mexican doctors gathered to protest the government’s inability to curb kidnappings. Last month one gunfight left 13 dead.  Indeed,

Homicides related to organized crime have jumped 47 percent so far this year: 1,378 deaths compared with 940 in the same period last year. (link)

How to make sense of all this violence?   Most agree it’s related to an aggressive crackdown by Mexican President Felipe Calderon on drug cartels that seems to be shaking up the previously established balances of power.  State sponsored military might is being met with military-style drug brigades.

All of this was on my mind this morning when I read about New Mexico Governor Richardson’s efforts to urge congress to approve Plan Merida - a bi-national aid package with a heavy emphasis on preparing Mexican police and armed forces to make a real stand against drug cartels.  Proponents argue the $1.4 billion three-year plan would improve border security by bankrolling military and law enforcement materiel acquisitions in exchange for Mexican assurances to investigate possible human rights violations by the military.   But in the same meeting, Mexican President Felipe Calderon blamed U.S. drug users for creating the voracious demand that fuels the drug trade.

It makes me think about the unified chorus we’ve been hearing lately from anti and pro-immigrant interviewees.  Everyone’s against crossing the border illegally.  It’s dangerous and there’s just too much money to be made on it by bad people.   As far away as a ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ seems at this point, talk of making it less profitable to spirit illegal drugs across the boundary seems confined to some well-justified grousing by a President who will almost certainly take the Merida Initiative money, if it indeed comes down the pipeline.

High school graduates march for the DREAM Act in Las Vegas…

Dozens of college students, many in graduation gowns and caps, marched from Valley High School to University of Nevada, Las Vegas, on Friday afternoon in support of legislation that would give undocumented young people a path toward legality.

The marchers traveled about 3.5 miles, chanting slogans such as “Books not borders!” and “Si se puede!” — “Yes we can!” — and carrying signs that read “Education not deportation” and “Fight for the Dream.”

A dozen men occupied the benches outside the orange and blue walls of the Grupo Beta office in Nogales, Sonora. The group is an arm of the federal government that provides aid and tries to dissuade migrants from illegally crossing into the U.S. The office is close to the Mariposa port of entry where hundreds are let off buses from detention centers all over the western U.S. and sent walking into Mexico. They sat on the bleachers of the basket ball court, out on the asphalt, in gas station parking lots asking for change, they walked in both directions down the streets, with backpacks or less, ready to go or freshly sent back.

As we walked in to arrange an interview with officialdom, one of the men looked up from the van’s license plate and said in an American accent “New York, that’s a long way to go.” We sat down and heard the story: Jose was born in Guadalajara and brought to the United States when he was 2. He was arrested after getting in a fight. With no social security number he was soon sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After a 24 hour layover in Phoenix, he got a free bus ride to Nogales, Sonora so he could start his life anew as it should have been lived in Mexico, the land of his birth.

Richard Durbin – the Democratic Senator from Illinois – proposed the DREAM Act (or Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act) to provide a path toward citizenship for young people, like Jose, who arrived in the U.S. because they had been brought with their parents. They go to American schools, become a part of teenage American culture, but won’t be able to go to college or get a job because they aren’t American citizens. The DREAM Act has never been voted on specifically since it has only been considered as part of omnibus bills such as the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007, or perhaps you’ve heard of the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006. Despite support from both sides of the aisle, neither bill passed, and thousands of American”ized” kids still fail to further their tax-paid high school educations. An estimated 60,000 students annually fall into this category, and that’s just the number that graduate from high school.

Jose wouldn’t have left high school his junior year had it not been for an auto accident that shattered his leg. If the DREAM Act were law, Jose probably wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the legalization process it envisions because he never graduated high school or got his GED. He faces obstacles settling his status with Mexican government as well. He has no proof of where he’s been for the last 18 years. To get back to the states he could apply for a student visa, if he’s allowed into the Mexican school system to graduate high school. Or when his Mexican citizenship checks out, he could apply for a work visa, and if all goes well he’ll be able to cross legally in 9 years.

It’s one of those stories you can always keep in mind when you feel like nothing’s going well, and you need to regain some perspective. Even if you don’t like your homework assignment, you can at least go to school. If your mad at your girlfriend, at least there isn’t an international border between you. And even if your country pisses you off sometimes, at least you have one.

on Mexican route 2, which takes a straight shot from Sonoyta, Mexico to the two San Luis that provide a port of entry into Yuma, Az. Sonoyta is just south of the border town Lukeville, which we found out has been given the unfortunate handle “Gringo Pass” by the its owner.

At first the van, filled with thousands of dollars of video equipment and computers, growled out gamely into the desert, its occupants in the dreamy haze of the “This American Life” podcast. We shared the narrow strip with fearless semi-trucks and buses out into a harsh landscape, dry desert, with no green accents, mountains like miniature Yosemite-style peaks, places where the hills are so jagged Department of Homeland Security saw no need to fence them. These were the only breaks in the constant tattoo of vehicle barrier or steel fence.

We had just interviewed with Tom and Dena Kay, ranchers near Arivaca who have witnessed gun battles (presumably between drug runners) on their border land, and the car barrier they praised for making their lives safer felt relatively unobtrusive. It’s simply a row of concrete-anchored posts connected by strands of barbed wire, to keep the livestock in.

It was fifty miles before the scream of the oil level alarm interrupted Ira Glass and brought us to a quick halt on the wrong side of the road. Hot oil was dripping from the back of the car. Diagnosis: a relatively innocuous failure in the tube used to fill up the oil reservoir. Duct tape had us back in action, but assuming we needed more oil than we carried, we tried for an hour to flag down one in a near constant stream of traffic. Finally, a soldierly young man slowed his truck, and cheerfully donated some motor oil.

The wall accompanying the highway 100 yards north then became what DHS calls the pedestrian barrier, a 30-foot high steel post and mesh construction on a sandy desert floor. We parked near it to give rocky a chance to pee. Parked nearly permanently. The rear wheels spin themselves into dry, hot, ditches. We needed a friendly tug out, we decided, preferably from a pickup. No one stopped.

An apricot sun slunk down the horizon, the air was still hot, but now ominous. A rundown truck blew its tires as it passed. The driver pulled over up the road to repair the damage, men piled out. We made a deal, beers for some strong backs and we were back on the road, sipping the night air.

We’re almost through Arizona.

Another sign of lawlessness Ciudad Juarez: gunmen killed the assistant police chief, Juan Antonio Roman, last night.  He was the first on a hit list of police officers published by one of the drug cartels last February.  Four others on the list have already been attacked, two killed.  We mentioned the hit list, known around Juarez by the ominous handle, ‘la lista,’ in our story about Carlos Huerta, a journalist for El Norte de Ciudad Juarez, who received death threats from one of the cartels in January. 

Juarez residents appear fed up with the bloodbath, and it looks like we just managed to avoid a gun battle in the tourist neighborhood where we shot the piece on the Norteños.

All in all, sobering news. 

Recent U.S. state department warnings regarding travel to Mexico, particularly as they pertain to increased border violence and the targeted assassination of journalists made me fear Ciudad Juarez in a way I have yet to experience in other border towns.

Our role as multimedia producers is clearly not the same as the role of a journalist working for a daily in Juarez, however. The fact that we will only present three stories from this city and edited them in a motel room 200 miles away, statistically suggests that we are not the demographic to be delivered to the local morgue loaded with narco wounds.

And yet, wielding our cameras through the city’s grid in search of Juarez b-roll was unnerving. While stopped at traffic signals, for example, I was struck by my unprovoked suspicion of men in idling SUVs with tinted windows. I tried to keep my white eyes from wandering, but some of what is sinister about Juarez is also morbidly profound, and if you’re accustomed to standing behind a camera, it’s tough to hold your gaze upon the ground.

As a result of the brutal narco-turf war currently menacing the city, 230 people have died in Juarez in the first 113 days of this year. In addition to this record homicide rate, Mexican federal police have recently discovered over a dozen graves containing a total of 48 unidentified human bodies, some of them dismembered. Three of the bodies were those of women.

Estimates vary how many women have been murdered or have gone missing in Ciudad Juarez since 1993, but local women advocacy groups place both statistics above the 500 mark. According to Friends of the Women of Juarez, three of those women – all under the age of 17- have disappeared since the first of this year and 17 others have already been assassinated. Despite efforts by various Mexican police and government authorities to suggest otherwise, the Ciudad Juarez femicide horror is not over.

In light of this violence, Charles Bowden’s depiction of the Ciudad Juarez as the “laboratory of the future,” strikes me as a chilling concept and difficult to ignore given the city’s pattern of growth and role as a cheap labor hub for nearly 300 multinational factory-owners. 200,000 Mexican workers-mostly women-are employed by local maquiladoras but average wages remain unchanged at $60 per 50-hour work-week. Thus, the ability for one to transcend his or her economic class persistently evades the working class. All the while, migrants from further south continue the quest for improved livelihoods of their own, often choosing to settle in the outskirts of the city, in slums that lack electricity and running water. With few economic opportunities available in an already cash-strapped city, the lure of drug money becomes a powerful temptation.

In an attempt to gain some control of Juarez’s bloody drug war, the government of President Felipe Calderon has sent more than 2,500 soldiers and federal agents into this community of 1.6 million people. We saw them, in their tanks and anonymous ski-masks but our interviews with local residents revealed a reality that is becoming all too familiar to my border sensitive ears: try and squeeze the cartels here, and they’ll go elsewhere.

The question that I now find myself asking is: if Ciudad Juarez is really the laboratory of the future, how long will the current experiment be ignored? The militarization of the border appears to be an increasingly favored approach- by both governments -to addressing the systemic problems of illegal immigration and drug trafficking but I’m not so sure either country has the army power to perpetually patrol 2000 miles of a dominantly undeveloped no-man’s world. What seems more evident is that until regional economic disparity trends reverse, drug dealers, human traffickers, crooked cops and some very violent gangsters will have an indefinite supply of recruits for desperate armies of their own.